Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “It wasn’t us,” Sked said.

  The three of them ran along the path toward the fence. Once there, they looked to the right and saw the big former Marine, the woman who’d come in with the lifeboats, inspecting a heap on the ground.

  She stood when she saw them approach and nodded towards it. “One of the natives, trying to climb over. He was aiming an arrow at the German woman back there, so I shot him off the fence.”

  Sked noticed she was carrying a pistol, a serious-looking semi-automatic befitting of a former member of the armed forces.

  “We should probably tell the management,” the Colonel said.

  “There were more of them,” the woman replied. “They ran off when this guy fell, but they weren’t happy.”

  As if to underscore her words, an arrow whistled out of the trees, clanged against the fence and fell short of their position, fletched shaft quivering in the sand.

  “We should get to cover,” the Colonel said. “Immediately.”

  They sprinted to the nearest cabin and watched the fence from behind its wall. The Colonel beat them to the place. He could still run, although he was puffing when they arrived.

  One of the blue-shirted resort workers was moving in the opposite direction and Sked grabbed him as he passed, bringing him to safety.

  “What’s going on?” the man sputtered.

  Sked recognized him as the guy in charge of the bar in the afternoon—a young Thai with a great sense of humor. And a guy always willing to tell a guest when they’d had enough to drink. A good man. “We need to get everyone off the beach and bring them together behind that cabin. Can you do that?”

  “Sure, but why?”

  “Islanders are attacking.”

  “Attacking?”

  “Just do it. We’ll explain to everyone together.”

  The guy wasn’t the manager—that worthy had been chomped attempting to save himself when the lifeboat was attacked—and that might actually have been a good thing. He didn’t argue, didn’t bluster or try to tell them that they weren’t in charge; he just set off in the direction of the old woman sunning herself by the shore.

  Sked chuckled. She’d been the target of the original arrow, and the Marine girl had saved her with a very loud gunshot… but the woman didn’t even appear to notice anything untoward was going on.

  Three men appeared from behind the cabin. Sked tensed when he recognized the Triad criminals from Philadelphia.

  “What the hell’s happening? We heard gunfire.”

  “One of the natives tried to climb the fence.” Sked pointed to the Marine, who had broken cover and was standing on the beach looking at the fence. “She shot him.”

  “That woman?”

  “Yeah. Apparently she was a Marine and now works security for a rich guy,” Akane said.

  “Looks like she could kick the shit out of all three of us.”

  The woman walked back to where they were standing. “I don’t need to kick the shit out of you,” she replied, showing that her hearing was much better than any of them had suspected. “I have a gun. By the way, the name’s Cora. Cora Gimenez. And I wasn’t just a Marine, I was a Marine sergeant, which means that I’m one of the meanest people you will ever meet. And from this moment on, you’re all going to do exactly what I tell you to, unless the Colonel over there prefers to take command of this island.”

  “What?” one of the Triad guys, Mike, said, spitting into the sand. “No way, bitch.”

  She moved quickly. A second later the offending man was down on the ground with Cora kneeling on his chest, her fist cocked to strike again.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” she said.

  The man chuckled. “I thought you weren’t going to kick the shit out of us.”

  That actually got a laugh. “I said I didn’t need to. I never said I wouldn’t do it just for fun.” She looked at the rest of them. “I have a feeling I don’t have time to train the people here, but you need to understand that following orders saves lives. The Colonel and I are the only ones here who have seen real combat.”

  “That’s not entirely accurate,” Sked said. “I’ve deployed on some umm… unofficial missions.”

  “How unofficial?”

  “Let’s just say that if governments were involved, they wouldn’t want me telling you so. But I know my way around both the command structure of small-unit covert operations and the kind of equipment they use. Urban and jungle.”

  She rolled her eyes. “One of those. All right. Anyone else?”

  No one spoke, so she got up and helped the Triad guy to his feet.

  “Then let’s go talk to the rest of the guests.”

  ***

  Cora looked over the faces in the crowd and sighed. Keeping these people alive on an excursion to a suburban mall would be hard enough… if the natives actually kept coming.

  They would. Murphy’s law guaranteed it. And if the islanders were smart, they’d come at night.

  “All right. Listen up. We’re in deep trouble, so I need everyone to pay attention. First off,” she turned to the staff. “Is everyone here?”

  The people in the blue shirts counted heads, conferred amongst themselves and finally one of them, the guy who’d been with them before, spoke. “It’s kind of hard to know for sure, because we don’t know exactly how many people came in on lifeboats, but we think so. All the guests are here for sure, and so is the staff.”

  “Thank you.” She’d already done the headcount of Lai’s people, and the ones that weren’t dead were accounted for. The bunny in the British bikini was there with the cook as were the sailors who hadn’t been involved in the doomed escape run.

  She nearly teared up to see the blond girl and the cook. Of the people she had sent on the other lifeboat, she suspected these were the only two who’d survived. And she was glad that the English girl had been one of them—Cora suspected that she hadn’t had an easy life, and the whole party-sex-kitten act was her way of getting out of a bad situation.

  Not every poor girl could join the Marines.

  “The natives tried to get in here earlier. They will try again, and if they do, they will kill every last one of us and then they will cook us and eat us.”

  An American woman, fiftyish and with blue-tinted hair, spoke: “How can this be? Are you saying that they built this resort knowing it was surrounded by cannibals?”

  “I have no idea, ma’am,” Cora replied. “I think the manager might have known, but he isn’t around. Anyone else have any ideas?”

  The blue-shirted guy who’d been elected speaker for the staff shrugged. “Not a clue. We just work here.”

  “Well, this is unacceptable,” the woman said. “You should just speak to the natives and apologize for coming here in the first place. This is the kind of abuse of native rights that leads to this kind of thing.”

  “Sure,” Cora smiled. “Feel free to do that. We’ll wait for you here.”

  “What… No, I mean…” Beside the blue-haired woman, Cora was amused to see her husband trying to pretend he didn’t know her. Their domestic life must, she thought, be interesting.

  “No one here was present when the initial talks with the natives happened so, since you kindly elected yourself human rights monitor, please go ahead and negotiate on our behalf.”

  “I meant someone else should do it.”

  “Of course you did. But since that is the dumbest suggestion ever, I would ask that you shut the hell up now.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “No, you don’t. So leave. But I won’t let anyone who stays with me lift a finger to help you when the natives come. I’m sure they’ll find you tasty.”

  “The staff has to help me.”

  “The staff have to try to stay alive. You are less than irrelevant.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that.”

  That was it. Cora took a step forward and looked down at the obnoxious lady. “If I hear another word from you,
I’ll beat you senseless and leave you here for the cannibals. An offering, if you like. So now either get out of my sight or shut the fuck up.”

  With that, Cora turned her attention away from the woman, and back to the staff. They would be the most helpful of the people, the ones who knew the lay of the land and what supplies were in store.

  And her verbal abuse of that particular guest seemed to have gone down well with them. They smiled to each other as they observed the woman’s discomfiture. Some guests just had that effect on people, she supposed.

  She’d made some allies. That, in turn, might make all the difference.

  Chapter 11

  Sabrina growled in frustration. The Compsognathus herd was doing nothing interesting, just ambling through the forest. She knew there were hundreds of natives living in those woods… but they were nowhere in sight. They must have some kind of camouflaged living spaces.

  Either that or they had all climbed into the trees. There was no sign of them or of the foreign visitors from the yacht and its lifeboats.

  Likewise, there was no sign of anyone doing anything in the water.

  Ratzenberger had located the yacht, but it had run aground in water too shallow for Kali and Shiva to approach… and no one on the island seemed inclined to sail out where her pets could reach them.

  Most frustrating of all was the fence around the resort. The thing was too tall to climb and too sturdy to topple. Maybe if, as Jermaine had wanted, they’d been able to build bigger land dinosaurs, it would have been a different story. Unfortunately, as things stood, there were a couple of dozen clueless people inside the fence who, unlike the islanders, couldn’t melt into the forest at will.

  Except she couldn’t reach them.

  “Dammit,” she said, and rose to stretch and take a walk.

  About halfway around the ship, an idea hit her. Moments later she was knocking on Tim Rugger’s door.

  “We have cell phones, you know,” the logistics director said when he answered her knock. He was dressed in nothing but a yellow towel wrapped around his waist, and Sabrina thought she could discern movement on the bed in his cabin as someone tried to cover herself with the sheets. The red hair identified the woman as another of her analysts.

  “I need your help.”

  “Can’t one of my team help you?”

  “With this? I doubt it.”

  He gave her a sour look, but they both knew that, girl in the cabin or no girl in the cabin, he had to do what she asked. “All right, give me a second.” The door shut unceremoniously.

  Moments later, Rugger appeared, wearing pants and a t-shirt as well as the strange cloth shoes he’d affected since they boarded the ship. He called them alpargatas and claimed one of the sailors sold them as a side gig and that gauchos out on the Pampas swore by them.

  Sabrina didn’t care, but so many people had asked him about them in her presence that she knew the explanation by heart.

  “I need you to set up some rafts to float a few Compsognathus onto the island, between those fences.”

  He held her gaze. “No one is going to believe that those aren’t putting people at risk,” he said.

  “That’s why I’m asking you, and you’ll need to bring trusted people into this only. Can you do it?”

  “Of course. We already floated the main herd onto the island, didn’t we?”

  “Yes. But that was unguided. We let the waves take them in. We can’t move in so close this time. They’ll see us.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t want that to happen. Survivors can’t know what happened. I want them to think that everything that hit them is native to the island.”

  “Between your beasties and the natives, I don’t think we’ll have too many survivors,” he replied.

  “We still can’t risk it. Is there any way to guide the rafts?”

  Rugger sighed. “Short of sending them in on rubber boats with people on board to steer, no.”

  “Then we’ll do that.” She hoped her tone made it clear that she wasn’t looking for an argument. This was something they absolutely had to do.

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  For a moment, she thought he would argue anyway, but then he sighed again. “And how many of these creatures are we supposed to drop on their doorstep?”

  “I think twenty should do it.”

  “Damn. Let me think about it. Give me half an hour.”

  “Take your time, it’s still about an hour before sundown, and we have to do this at night. Remember not to involve anyone…”

  “…who doesn’t already know,” he completed the phrase. “Yeah, there’s no need to beat me over the head with it. I don’t want to wind up in jail any more than you do.”

  He walked off to consult with his team.

  ***

  The shadows grew longer and Cora watched them without enthusiasm. This would be her second night on the island, which was just stupid. She couldn’t believe the imbeciles had no way to contact the mainland, not as much as a satellite phone. What would they do if there was an emergency? The attitude was completely insane.

  Supposedly, there was a boat that had gone to Andaman to report the jet ski incident, but everyone had given it up for lost. With the monster out there, that was the only possible conclusion to explain its non-return.

  She’d trained to be able to deal with the reality of finding herself cut off from the world. Being behind enemy lines without the ability to communicate due to equipment failure or having comms get compromised, unlikely as that latter scenario was. Her unit’s training had put them through every scenario the brass had managed to think up—plus a bunch she suspected the brass would never have been able to have envisioned without heavyweight help from people with actual brains—and taught the troops how to deal with it, both mentally and physically.

  She’d always thought that part of her training had stuck.

  Well, it hadn’t, at least not the psychological part. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that they were actually out in the boonies with no way to talk to people. Even in the friggin’ middle of the Indian Ocean, the yacht had had an internet connection, even if cell phones were forbidden for everyone but Lai to avoid overloading the wi-fi, you could still connect to the outside world.

  Fortunately, the rest of her training still held firm. Stupid or not, this was the situation she had to deal with. And that meant sticking to the plan.

  The plan was that there were teams of two people walking the perimeter. These consisted of the young and healthy people: the three Asian guys from Philadelphia, Sked and the thin woman with him, the resort staff, Mary—the bunny’s name, of all things, had turned out to be Mary—and the ship’s cook, and the remaining sailors. Lai and the Colonel had been included on their own insistence, and a couple of forty-odd-year-old guests were also added, but most of the guests had remained holed up in one of the cabins. Ten teams in all, each with instructions to yell and run for help if they saw anything at all amiss.

  Now was the most dangerous time. Night fell quickly in these latitudes, and it would soon be full dark. The staff had told her that the lights would come on automatically when it was dark enough, but they weren’t clear on whether that would happen on a timer, a light sensor or what.

  So it was conceivable that there would be some minutes of near-complete darkness before the lights came on.

  They’d find out in a few minutes.

  She was paired with one of the forty-somethings, a balding guy from South America whose weeping wife had wanted him to remain in the room with them, but who’d offered to help anyway. His English was heavily accented, but with a strangely ample vocabulary.

  “Do you think they’ll come tonight?” he said.

  “I’m sure of it. That’s how I’d do it.”

  “But you’re a soldier. These guys are like cavemen or something. They aren’t even civilized.”

  “That doesn’t make them any less dangerous,” she reminde
d him.

  “I suppose. But we have guns.”

  “Three of them.”

  She’d been surprised to learn that the Colonel had come unarmed, but unsurprised when he told her in his clipped accent that he had come to burn himself to a nice angry red color under a tropical sun, not kill insurgents in their sleep. So he’d put swimwear in the space his gun would normally have occupied. “A soldier,” he said archly, “prepares himself for the task at hand.”

  “It should be enough. They’ve probably never seen one before. They’ll think it’s some kind of magic.”

  “You haven’t read much military history, have you? Give it a shot sometime. You’ll be especially interested in colonial skirmishes in the American West and Sub-Saharan Africa.”

  That seemed to fly way over his head, but he must have understood the subtext, because he shut up. She kept her eyes pinned on the shadows of the forest beyond the fence: that was where the bad guys would come from, and that was also a good way to keep her eyes accustomed to seeing in the growing darkness.

  To her relief, the lights came on with an audible click. They were soft at first, but within three minutes, they had achieved operating temperature and threw up decent illumination.

  Military-grade, in fact. She wondered why a resort would have such good lights.

  Cora shook her head to clear it. That wasn’t her problem. Her problem was to spot whoever was trying to come through the glare before whoever it was spotted her.

  They completed the first lap of the complex without incident and stopped at the lobby where the older guests and the women who’d opted out of guard duty were holed up. They reported that all was well and headed out to the perimeter again.

  Ten minutes into their second lap, Cora’s conviction that an attack was imminent began to flag. The woods seemed quiet and peaceful as befitted a tropical paradise.

  In the distance, someone screamed.

  Cora and her companion turned to see if they could spot where the screams were coming from before they died out.

  But they didn’t die out.

  “It’s coming from the resort,” the guy said.

  Cora nodded and they sprinted for the complex. The guy must have been frantic about his wife because, chubby or not, he gained on her. She pulled her gun out of the holster as they ran.